Source Guru

Just a note - if you’ve sent me any important email in the last 24 hours, then please re-send. I’ve had to wipe my mailboxes due to a 10,000 strong backscatter of bounced email…

Some of you may know that I’m looking for a new job.

Well, anyway, I had a Phonecall from Kalamazoo Reynolds earlier, who, 3 questions into the interview asked.

“Do you smoke?”

“Yes”

“Ok, then please feel free to re-apply if you ever give up, we have a company policy in place that we do not employ smokers”

Is this legal?

Is less than a week away

So, yes, am on crew, and am also on the Speakers List as I’m organising the Keysigning Party.

If you’ve got the weekend spare - and can make it to Wolverhampton - why not come along and meet some of the wonderful people that are the LugRadio community. It’s only £5 on the door (which is entry for both days) and well - Just look at the schedule to see the kind of talks that are going on.

Plus, It’s also going to be the LAST EVER LugRadio - so it’s really your last chance to see, plus you’ll be participating in a historic moment in FLOSS history (just wish it was the start of something rather than the end!)

So obligatory LRL advertising post over - hope to see you there!

Yes, that toything. Hehe.

Ok, so after one of my Flatmates decided to tread on my wireless dongle (which I had trailing on a long USB cable down the stairs outside my room so I could actually pick up the signal!) and break it, I haven’t used my Desktop machine in a good few months. It was pretty much of a case of without internet access, it was pretty useless other than for watching DVDs on (which is when I’d boot it up) - so I used my eeePC instead.

Anyway, I went out and bought a nice new PCI Wireless card today - no chance of it being trodden on. And I got a nice one with 2 aerials, for connectivity purposes (and I can say - it’s boosted my signal from what was on average 15% on the wireless dongle to on average 65%!)

I’m happy and actually surprised that Ubuntu picked it up straight away, and even used the settings from my old Wireless dongle to connect straight away!

Anyway, after a while, I hardlocked…. I hate hardlocking… tis so annoying. So I rebooted into the Hardy Installer CD (This still has Gutsy on) and tried an install… Another hardlock…

Uh-Oh I thought …. and ran memtest86+ - no problems… Try again.. another hardlock.

Ok, reopen PC to see if wiggling the wires does something…. OW! I burnt my hand…

My PC was seriously overheating.. So - I had a look - MY PSU and CPU fans were clogged up with orange dust. :’( damnit.

So I took a walk down to Maplin and went and got myself some compressed air… Something I’d learnt from my IT Technician days was a godsend for cleaning CPU Fans.

Anyway, My PC is now sparkly and shiny inside, and on a plus, I’ve gotten rid of the annoying rattle it’s had for the past year… I thought it was the CD drive… as it would always stop when I whacked the CD drive (another trick I learnt as an IT Technician!)

So yeah - I’d suggest that any geek out there goes and invests in a can of compressed air (or ‘airduster‘ as it seems to be branded these days) - It is the magic computer fixing tool… if it can’t be fixed with compressed air, (and/or wiggling the cables) you might as well replace it - it’ll save you time and stop you banging your head against the wall

I just wish I’d thought and taken photos of how dusty it was (It was orange dust too - which was strange… I think the dust puppy’s are becoming Ubuntu themed)

(Click to View)

… that is the question.

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous harrasments,
or take ops against a sea of trolls,
and by opposing, end them? To /part; to /quit;
No more; and by a /quit say we end
The head-ache, and thousand virtual pings
That IRC is heir to, ’tis a consumation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To /part; to /quit;
To /quit, perchance to /ignore: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that /quit, what messages may come
When we have shuffled off this virtual coil,
Must give us pause, there’s the respect
That makes calamity of such low ping;
For who could bear the whips and scorns of time?
The operator’s wrong, the users contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after disconnection,
That undiscover’d country from whose bourne
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.–Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.

So, am sittig in my hotel room, after spending way too long getting here, drinking tea, and using up the Wifi.

It doesn’t actually start till tomorrow, so not much to say - but I shall probably blog some more.

Good night out tonight, with a few of the Speakers, some good conversation, though really dissappointed that everywhere stops selling food at like - 10pm. Which is about when we got to the hotel. I think I’ve had a single bitterballe (or however it’s spelt) - roll on breakfast tomorrow morning is all I can say - and dissapointed that the place we went to only had two kinds of beer, or wine….

Still, all good fun, looking forward to tomorrow. Just not liking the fact I have a single bed. I haven’t slept in one for 6 years!

So - after my post about wanting a conference laptop - I went out and bought one today. I got myself a nice, large, Dual Core 17″ Jobby. Ok, I’ve realised afterwards that it might be a bit of a gas guzzler, but, at least, as long as I have power, it should meet all my needs. And it’s the first machine that I’ve had where, out of the box, everything works perfectly, and the first where I’ve been able to properly use the Desktop effects (Darn proprietary Video Cards!)

Anyway, along with this - I’ve now installed Ubuntu on it. Actual Ubuntu - rather than Kubuntu. This means that I now have nearly a full shipment of *buntu that I’m regularly using. Kubuntu @ work and on my desktop at home, Xubuntu on the eeePC, and Ubuntu on this new Laptop.

I also had fun thinking up another name for the laptop. I’ve called it synergy. Which basically means lots of small things working together to make something greater in whole than of it’s component parts (Think of two muscles working together to give you a sort of idea) - The reason? Well - partly because my computer naming scheme revolves around the “I can’t be bothered of thinking of a name” (put politely) - and - synergy, is of course, ultimate laziness, putting small things together to make something bigger (convoluted excuse I know!) and well - it completes my having what my idea of the 3 primary WM’s are (Gnome, KDE, and XFCE), and means that my experience of Linux as a whole, is a more rounded and richer experience (Again, convoluted!) but anyway - here are my machines and what I call them (from the newest acquisition to the oldest)

• Synergy - The new “Conference” Laptop
• Stupor - My VPS for running the important things on
• Lethargy - My eeePC
• Coma - My work PC
• Anorak - Radio Amarok’s primary server (named after a Radio Amarok inside joke)
• Torpor - My “playground” VPS (where I keep all the non-critical stuff)
• Apathy - My Home Desktop

So - those are my machines, but, knowing that I have a similar naming schema to Daniel Silverstone, it begs me to ask.

What do you call your machines and why?

Annoyances

So - today I decided that I needed a “conference laptop”

Basically, at the moment, I have my main desktop, (custom built monster) and an eeePC.

While the eeePC does exactly what I need it to, which is be portable, and have wifi - so I can check email etc etc on the fly, it doesn’t lead itself very well to developing on the move. If I try to compile anything but the most basic, it dies. So, I thought that I’d take some of my paycheck and invest a few Quid in a lower end laptop.

What I need is

• At least 1Gb RAM
• A Processor around the 1.7 GHz mark
• As much disk space as possible
• Wifi
• 15″ Screen size minimum

What I’d also LIKE is

• Compatible Video card for stuff like Compiz, etc
• Wifi Chipset that’s compatible with Linux without me having to hack away for hours to get it working (preferably something that works out the box)
• Something where I’m not paying extra for the privilege of having Windows installed before I wipe it

Ok, so - these things, espescially in the “What I need” - are fairly standard. So I went around a few websites and started trying to find the best deals. I went to ebuyer, dabs, Dell and PC World (not linked - I’ll explain why in a moment!)

Well, looking through these sites, one thing came to me pretty much instantly, and that’s that none of them seem capable of telling me what chipset the Wireless cards are running. and pretty much all of them (in most cases) lack sufficient information for a tech savvy person to actually decide whether it meets their specifications. It’s a bit like buzzword bingo on some of the sites. They give you all the weird and wonderful wacky names that come along with the technologies, without even giving you details about it. Dell is one of the few sites that gives you the information you need. But it still doesn’t tell you what chipset it’s running.

Well, anyways - that’s my first annoyance. My second… is one of putting “bling” ahead of usability, or in some cases, using technologies where it’s not even needed. The PC World website uses Javascript extensively. I, out of habit - tend to middle-click on pretty much everything when I’m browsing (ending up with my record of 37 tabs open in Firefox today!) but, when a link links to a javascript: URL - it doesn’t work. So, I goto the PC world website, click on “Laptops” and see a selection of types - I middle click on a couple of them to get the different choices, but no such luck. The tabs open to about:blank cause they don’t know what to do with Javascript.

Now, as a web developer - I know that this is a bad thing. I know that a link should have a static URL, and an onclick handler (or event listener, or whatever) if it wants to do Javascript stuff. This isn’t purely for the people who want to surf the web with Javascript turned off (which I’m sometimes tempted to do!) - but it also makes the site accessible for those who want to open a link in a new tab, in a new window, etc etc.

I’ll stop my griping now. But, please, for the love of god, if you create a website, make sure it’s accessible to anyone who doesn’t want to just stick around in a single window. If I wanted to do that - I’d use Prism (or whatever it’s called!)

Ok, by popular demand (aka ompaul) I’ve decided to do a mini-howto on setting up networking on an ubuntu server, for those who are new to it.

In Ubuntu itself, when you install the desktop version, you get a nifty little tool called “Network Manager” (you may have noticed the icon, espescially if you have wireless) which pretty much does everything for you. However, if you’re using the server, without a GUI then this isn’t generaly available.

So, where to start?

It really depends on your network setup, you need to know a few things about your network before you start this.

The first and most important question you need to find out is whether there is a DHCP server on your network that will assign you an IP address. If so, your networking setup is very very simple, so I’ll start off with that.

Networking with an available DHCP server

When you have a DHCP server available on your network, things are made a lot simpler. Cut short, a DHCP server sits on your network and hands out configurations to the different computers that ask for them. I won’t go into detail, but, generally you’ll find these on small home networks (your router will generally work as a DHCP server, which is why you (usually) magically find your way onto the internet when you plug yourself into a network with a router on it)

First of all, find out whether you actually already have an internet connection. I’ll assume for now that you have a keyboard and monitor hooked up to the computer you’re setting up as a server, and have logged in as a user with sudo rights.

Type in the command “ifconfig” (without the quotes) and you should hopefully see something like this:-

mez@stupor:~$ ifconfig

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:3E:7F:AC:B2
inet addr:212.13.30.94  Bcast:212.13.30.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
RX packets:3576458 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1886783 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
RX bytes:836607596 (797.8 MB)  TX bytes:291514569 (278.0 MB)

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
RX packets:73611 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:73611 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:15252378 (14.5 MB)  TX bytes:15252378 (14.5 MB)

The important bit we see here is the block of text starting with “eth0″ and espescially the line

inet addr:212.13.30.94  Bcast:212.13.30.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

This generally means that the computer already has an IP address! yay!

Next, try the command

ping google.com

Hopefully, you’ll get back a response saying something along the lines of

PING google.com (64.233.187.99) 56(84) bytes of data
64 bytes from jc-in-f99.google.com (64.233.187.99): icmp_seq=1 ttl=245 time=100 ms

If so, you have a working internet connection! Go you! you can now start using your computer on the internet (though the IP address given above might only be accessible from an internal network, depending on your setup - going into howto get this IP available on the internet proper is beyond the scope of this blog post)

If not, you’ll get one of two errors, either a “no route to host” or a “cannot resolve google.com”.

The first issue is a complex one, which again, is beyond the scope of this article (though feel free to email me to ask questions - or catch me on IRC - I will *try* to answer them)

The second one generally means that you do not have a nameserver setup.

Open DNS is a project that provides Accessible DNS resolvers for the whole world to use. More information can be found out about OpenDNS here

For now however, lets open up your DNS resolver settings

sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

This file should be edited to contain the following lines only

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

Hit Ctrl + O then enter, then Ctrl + X to get back to your command prompt.

Try pinging google again, and hopefully it should work. If not, something went wrong somewhere, again, try emailing me or poking me on IRC.

So, what if you don’t have an IP address?

Well, assuming that you DO have a DHCP server running on your network, lets first of all check that we have a working interface on our system

ifconfig -a

You should hopefully see a couple of lines here, one starting with “lo” and another starting with “eth0″ (or similar) - remember this name

Now, open up your /etc/network/interfaces file (sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces) and make sure it contains the following

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Assuming that it does, we should be able to do the following

sudo ifup eth0

Which will (hopefully) bring the interface up. Go back a step if you cannot resolve google.com when trying to ping it. You might have to setup a resolver (though your DHCP server should provide these details for you!)

Voila! hopefully you now have a working network interface

Networking without an available DHCP server

Now, here is where things get more interesting. To be able to setup a network without having a DHCP server readily available, you need to know the following

• The IP address that will be assigned to your host
• The netmask for the IP addresses being used
• The default gateway’s IP address (usually the IP address of your router)

It may differ how you get this information, however, I cannot tell you how to do so, I’d ask your network administrator if I were you (or your hosting provider)

So, I’m assuming here that you have the above details, are logged in at your machine and ready to go

I’ll only be brief about this setup, as a lot of the details are covered above.

First of all, make sure that your interface is down

sudo ifdown eth0

next, edit your /etc/network interfaces, replacing the information between < and > with
the information from above

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
	address <IP Address>
	netmask <Network Mask>
	gateway <Default Gateway>

So, you should have something like this

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
	address 212.13.30.94
	netmask 255.255.252.0
	gateway 212.13.30.1

Now head back to your console, and try

sudo ifup eth0

To bring your interface up. Hopefully, now, everything should be working (if not, go have a look at the DNS stuff above)

If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a comment here, or email me (martin AT sourceguru DOT net) and I will try and answer, though I make no guarantees!

Thus concludes Mez’s basic guide to server networking on ubuntu - I’ll try and add some more interesting stuff in a later blog post (IPv6, IP Aliases, etc etc)